The ink jet record technique is a technique for giving ejection energy to ink using mechanical energy of piezoelectric elements, etc., or heat energy of heating elements and ejecting ink droplets from a recording head and depositing the ink droplets on a recording medium for forming dots for recording. In recent years, the record technique has become increasingly widespread because it has the features of providing a sharp record image, a low noise level of a drive, easy colorization, etc.
As recording media for using the record mode to form an image containing text for recording, recording media provided with no ink reception layer and having no coat layer, such as plain paper and bond paper, recording media having a coat layer, or a coat layer having such as a glossy layer and a mat layer, on a substrate such as paper and a film, and the like are known. In recent years, recording of a sharp full-color image at higher resolution and can-stability of the recorded image have been desired for the record media.
JP-A-63-299970 and JP-A-64-9279 disclose each an ink jet recording method of depositing some type of liquid before depositing ink on a recording medium for the purpose of good fixing of ink. However, there is a problem of lacking in the can-stability of an image recorded by the recording method.
JP-A-8-104000 discloses a method of performing optimum treatment in response to the type of record material such as a transparent sheet for OHP and improving image quality. In the method, a method of using print property improvement liquid and adjusting the optimum amount of the print property improvement liquid in response to the ambient temperature and humidity environments is adopted. The image quality of a record provided by the method is improved, but the method also involves a problem of lacking in the can-stability of an image.
JP-A-10-226055 discloses an ink jet recording apparatus and recording method based on ejection amount control of treatment liquid before and after ink ejection for the purpose of improving the record quality. However, treatment liquid cannot be selected for different recording media and applicable recording media are limited.
Recording media having a coat layer or having no coat layer are mainly used as recording media, but the recording media having a coat layer are available in a wide range from those for ink jet record to those for offset print.
It is therefore an object of the invention to provide a recording apparatus and a recording method for making it possible to select pretreatment, inkjet record, posttreatment and execute any desired record for all recording media including a recording medium having no coat layer and a recording medium having a coat layer in a single ink jet recording apparatus.